Scribbr’s Post

We believe feedback is the key to learning and improving as an individual, team, and company. 💪 That's why we value our open feedback culture so much! This feedback culture has a strong foundation in our values: 🚀 Growth | We need feedback to grow and are open to learning 👐 Openness | Giving and receiving feedback should be your habit 💪 Leadership | You are in charge of your own development 🎁 Happiness | We positively impact one another We recently renewed what we call our “feedback cycle”, which is designed to let feedback flow continuously. It consists of three elements: 1️⃣ Weekly one-on-one talks between team members and their managers—where team members own the agenda and coaching takes place. 2️⃣ Ongoing peer feedback—we encourage our team to regularly ask for feedback from peers, rather than waiting until a bi-annual review moment. 3️⃣ Bi-annual cockpit conversations where team members are in the lead (get it? In the cockpit ✈️) and reflect on their performance with their managers. We completed the first cycle in its new form last quarter and have received positive responses so far! But, as you should talk the talk, we are gathering feedback from our team to continuously improve this way of working. Let's grow together! 🚀

As a team, we recently reflected on the impact we made, how we collaborated, inspired each other, and lived by our values. ✨ We opened a digital “kudos wall” where all team members could write down messages of appreciation for other team members and teams. The number of notes people left was astonishing. 🤯 But even more so were the beautiful and motivating messages that were shared. A selection: 👏 Eoghan Ryan, your growth in the content team has been impressive. I am confident you’ll do great in your new role!   👏 Gytė Tamašauskaitė, every time I talk to you, I am amazed by your analytical mind and smart ideas. Keep up the good work! 👏 Patrick Howell, thank you for always giving a 110%! 👏 Without Yana Avramenko, there would be less collaboration and success within the engineering team. Thank you for the hard work!  👏 Laura Eichhorner, you’re such a team player! You collaborate with everyone from all partner companies and share your knowledge along the way (while staying too humble). Looking forward to achieving our goals together in 2024! 🚀

And we are proud of both our co-founders Bas Swaen👋😃🚀 and Koen Driessen, and the rest of our Leadership team Hannah Schindelwig Martijn Smit Amber van Dort and Stefan Boersma for leading our team through change and inspiring us to grow!

The Scribbr team got together for our annual Christmas event last Friday! 🎄 This was the perfect moment to: ✅ Connect with the team. ✅ Celebrate our successes. ✅ Reflect on the past year. Like our co-founders mentioned in their end-of-year speech, 2023 was a challenging but, most of all, exciting year: 💪 We innovated and reinvented ourselves to adapt to market developments. 💪 We strengthened our collaboration with our partners QuillBot and LanguageTool.  💪 While we continued to live by our values of growth, leadership, openness, and happiness. We are extremely proud of the adaptability, positive mindset, and efforts of our team and are excited for 2024! ✨

We are thrilled to announce that we have reached third place in the Education Awards with our Grammar Checker, hosted by renowned market research firm DISQ Deutsches Institut für Service-Qualität GmbH & Co. KG! 🥂 🥉 We are proud to have secured third place in the “Best Grammar Checker” category, alongside some tough competition. A huge congratulation to our partner company LanguageTool for securing second place! 👏 None of this would have been possible without the dedication of some remarkable people on our team: Luca Corrieri, Laura Eichhorner, Tobias Solís, Nina Wieneritsch, and Hannah Schindelwig. Thank you for your unwavering commitment! 🚀 As we celebrate this milestone, we are more determined than ever to improve our AI-powered Grammar Checkers. Hopefully, we will reach the coveted first place next year!

Taking the leap can lead to incredible opportunities – our team member took that leap when she joined Scribbr last year, and we are proud of her! 🙌 At Scribbr, we are willing to change direction when necessary. We see change as an opportunity for growth. Not being set in our ways, allows us to be open to trying new things. An important quality that we value in our team members! 🚀

Meet the minds at Scribbr: Introducing Patryk Uran, Front-end developer and responsible for the visual aspects of Scribbr’s website. 💻 🖱️ “Whenever you click on a button or open a modal on one of Scribbr’s pages, think of me as the one who put them there!” Patryk explains what he does in a nutshell. 🚀 He is part of a team of developers in control of our order- and customer management system called “Houston”, referencing to the location of NASA’s space center and the famous phrase “Houston, we’ve got a problem”. Quite the fun fact! 🌐 It’s a highly international team: “I consider this as one of the most exciting aspects of working at Scribbr. It’s interesting to learn how to balance Dutch straightforward communication and the more laid-back conversations with other colleagues. More importantly than only seeing our differences, such experiences show how similar we are as well!” 💪 Clearly, differences make for a stronger team. “While some prioritize working efficiently, others prefer taking more time to deliver well-analyzed code. This mix often results in higher-quality code delivered on time.” Let’s continue to find similarities, leverage differences, and use them to our advantage!

What better way to start the week than by receiving wonderful customer feedback! We're thrilled that our Citation Generator Chrome extension has made such a positive impact. 🚀

At Scribbr, team members benefit from a free day off on their birthday, plus they have the opportunity to swap public holidays if they wish. 🎂🌴 Celebrate your special day your way with a day off on your birthday. And if traditional holidays don’t align with your cultural or religious practices, you can choose to work on those days and swap them for other holidays that are significant to you. 🌎 One of our team members, Martijn, shares his experience: “Generally, I don’t celebrate my birthday much. This time, however, we wanted to spend it in Greece, so I used my day off to supplement this little vacation!” ☀️⛵ We believe in the importance of taking time off from work to recharge your batteries. 🔋 This will help our team stay productive, and bring their best and most present self back to work. How do you like to recharge your batteries?